Why are Wedding Vendors so Expensive? 

Wedding planning can be overwhelming! Once you start shopping for all of your vendors, you will soon find out that your budget may not be able to be so tight after all.  As a wedding vendor myself, I think it's super important to know what your paying for. "Why are all these vendors so expensive?" 

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Well, let's chat about it.

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 #1 TIME - A lot of vendors base their pricing off of time. The time it takes to do the services with your specific needs and requests. Some may even charge a hourly rate. Ask your vendor about this. 

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#2 CONTACT - When you hire a wedding vendor, you're hiring them well in advance. About a year ahead of time on average. Majority of the time, these vendors are working for you up until your wedding day. Keeping in constant contact with the client, emailing, getting you booked, setting up appointments, responding to questions, making timelines, then prepping for the day of. There's a lot of things going on behind the scenes that even though there is a singular booking, you're pretty much hiring them for a year. 

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#3 NO WEEKENDS - I think it's safe to say that no one enjoys working weekends, especially Saturdays. There are some vendors who work another job during the week and this is their "side hustle". Because we work weekends, we have to miss a lot of events and don't really get a lot of time off to travel or make advanced plans. We as vendors need to make sure that this job is worth our time. 

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#4 TRAVEL - It's a lot of wear and tear on your car, a lot of mileage, and gas is not cheap. Some vendors will have to travel long distances to you and back. They have to wake up super early to arrive on time and possibly had to clean, prep, and pack up their car to leave that morning. Majority of us vendors, have a lot of equipments to bring, load up, and unload. 

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#5 PRODUCT & EXPENSES - I know for me as a wedding vendor, I have a lot of products and expenses that come with the services I offer. Just one foundation alone costs anywhere from $30-$50 and that's with a artist discount. We have to make sure we make enough profit from our services to live off of, but also offer the best of tools and unfortunately, inflation hasn't helped with that.

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#6 MARKETING - Majority of wedding vendors do their own marketing to save money. They make, design, and monitor all their own websites. They have to persistently respond to emails, calls, etc and also continue to post content to their social media to push sales. We pay for websites, advertising, marketing, programs to share and edit images, and a lot more. 

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#7 EXPERIENCE - We try our best to save you stress, time, and money! We know and offer many different suggestions to you as much as possible based off of our experience we have. With my services I offer, there is a lot of artistry behind the work I do. You're getting what you pay for in that aspect!

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Now after all that, because most of us work for ourselves, we don't get any benefits, PTO, personal medical or dental insurance. But also, we don't take out taxes so in the end, we are only getting a percentage of what we made. We have to pay back taxes. 

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I hope this helps any future bride who really wants to understand the breakdown of what we include in our pricing. Working in the wedding industry is by no means easy, but if you love it like I do, we can make it all worth it in the end! 

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Happy vendor shopping!! 

xoxo Gaby

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